I Can Explain - Introduction - Why should you care what i have to say? - By m.w.clark

Why should you care what I have to say? I can explain. My name is Michael Wayne Clark. I have three names not because I'm pompous. It's because Michael and Clark are very common names For my generation, and Wayne is a distinguishing factor. I got my Ph.D. from U.C.L.A., that's the University of California, Los Angeles, In Biology, and I did that in About the latter part of the twentieth century So yeah, a bit old. I'm here now, in Santa Monica, In front of the ocean as you can see, and I thought this was a nice place to Introduce my video series which is on Explaining fundamental concepts of science and biology, which I call, “I CAN EXPLAIN”. The reason that you should care about What I have to say is that I've been teaching These concepts for last thirty odd years, and I uhmm know what I'm doing Now to my experience, My Ph.D. thesis was on the molecular Structure of the (bacterial) ribosome. The ribosome is the cellular organelle Responsible for protein synthesis In all cells. The organism that I worked on was the Bacterium that is isolated from the Human gut Called Escherichia coli., Or E. Coli for short. The species named Coli actually is Derived from where exactly it was Extracted from, The colon. And again, that's the End of the human intestine, and Not the punctuation mark. Actually, you are already familiar with One of the main features of this organism, E. Coli. One of the reasons that your flatulence smells, That when you pass gas and it stinks, It’s because of The bacterial waste products. YES! My lab did smell just like a big stinky one. So, what I did, in my own defence, Was I always used to say, and I still do say this, “Don't blame me. Blame the bacteria!”. Bacterium are generally categorized as Prokaryotes. Which means that they don’t have a membrane bound nucleus Internally inside their cells. They are different from, say like us, a cell which is Referred to as a Eukaryotes, because Eukaryotes have a membrane bound nucleus within the cell. So, once I graduated from UCLA, I wanted to do a couple of things. One, I wanted to move up the phylogenetic tree, And study some cells more like us, and also I wanted Something that smelled more pleasant, okay, than bacterium. That organism of choice was the (single celled) yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae. or Baker’s yeast. It fulfills both of these criteria, One is that it is a Eukaryotic cell, It has membrane bound nucleus, it is much like Uhmm us human beings, okay? And it smells much much better, okay? It makes the lab smell like uh, baking bread instead of a toilet, okay? Another good aspect of dealing with Saccharomyces cerevisiiae or S. cerevisiae for short is the fact that you can treat it much like a bacteria. In the fact that you can grow them up relatively, In a relatively short time, and you can get billions of them Which you can kill without any guilt. To study S. cerevisiae, I took postdoctoral fellowship at California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, CA. At Cal Tech I specifically studied how the genetic information, The DNA, that stored in the membrane bounded nucleus, got processed, To be utilized in the cytoplasm to make proteins. On, as I've spoken before, a ribosome, a cellular ribosomes. I was at Cal Tech for five years, studying these processes, uh, And then after that I got an Assistant Professorship at McGill University in Montreal where I had my own lab, and I further studied the Eukaryotic nucleus, using yeast by... But in this case, I was studying the genes that were Responsible for the actual structure and Function of the nucleus. In my own lab, I was able to identify five genes That were evolved in these processes, But were also evolved not only in the yeast but also in humans, and the human genes could actually be utilized in yeast To cause a functional cell. So after 25 years of research in the lab, in the academics, I decided to move on into business, but I still liked teaching. So I have been teaching part-time off and on in a various Universities here in Southern California, And in the process, I've developed this style or Method of teaching which many of the students have found, Not only entertaining, but also very useful in the fact that they learn things. So, in these episodes of “I Can Explain“, I'm going to use those methods to help you understand some of the Basic fundamental concepts of biology and science, And hopefully, you learn something.